500 Chapter 18 American Society in the Industrial Age
The unhealthiness of the tenements was notorious.
No one knows exactly, but as late as 1900 about three-
quarters of the residents of New York City’s Lower
East Side lacked indoor toilets and had to use backyard
outhouses to relieve themselves. One noxious corner
became known as the “lung block” because of the
prevalence of tuberculosis among its inhabitants. In
1900 three out of five babies born in one poor district
of Chicago died before their first birthday.
Slums bred criminals—the wonder was that they
did not breed more. They also drove well-to-do resi-
dents into exclusive sections and to the suburbs.
From Boston’s Beacon Hill and Back Bay to San
Francisco’s Nob Hill, the rich retired into their clut-
tered mansions and ignored conditions in the poorer
parts of town.
New York City Tenementsat
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The Cities Modernize
As American cities grew larger and more crowded,
thereby aggravating a host of social problems, practi-
cal forces operated to bring about improvements.
Once the relationship between polluted water and
View theImagedisease was fully understood, everyone saw the need
for decent water and sewage systems. (See Mapping
the Past, “Cholera: A New Disease Strikes the
Nation,” pp. 498–499.) While some businessmen
profited from corrupt dealings with the city machines,
more of them wanted efficient and honest govern-
ment in order to reduce their tax bills. City dwellers
of all classes resented dirt, noise, and ugliness, and in
many communities public-spirited groups formed
societies to plant trees, clean up littered areas, and
develop recreational facilities. When one city under-
took improvements, others tended to follow suit,
spurred on by local pride and the booster spirit.
Gradually the basic facilities of urban living were
improved. Streets were paved, first with cobblestones
and wood blocks and then with smoother, quieter
asphalt. Gaslight, then electric arc lights, and finally
Edison’s incandescent lamps brightened the cities
after dark, making law enforcement easier, stimulat-
ing night life, and permitting factories and shops to
operate after sunset.
Urban transportation underwent enormous
changes. Until the 1880s, horse-drawn cars running
on tracks set flush with the street were the main means
of urban public transportation. In 1860 New York
City’s horsecars were carrying about
100,000 passengers a day. But horse-
cars had serious drawbacks. Enormous
numbers of horses were needed, and
feeding and stabling the animals was
costly. Their droppings (ten pounds
per day per horse) became a major
source of urban pollution. That is why
the invention of the electric trolley car
in the 1880s put an end to horsecar
transportation. Trolleys were cheaper
and less unsightly than horsecars and
quieter than steam-powered trains.
A retired naval officer, Frank J.
Sprague, installed the first practical
electric trolley line in Richmond,
Virginia, in 1887–1888. At once
other cities seized on the trolley. Lines
soon radiated outward from the city
centers, bringing commuters and
shoppers from the residential districts
to the business district. Without them
the big-city department stores could
not have flourished as they did. By
1895 some 850 lines were busily haul-
ing city dwellers over 10,000 miles of
track, and mileage tripled in the fol-
lowing decade. As with other new
enterprises, ownership of street rail-
ways quickly became centralized untilOn Sundays in the late nineteenth century, city people crowded into streetcars and headed
to the countryside. Enticed by this taste of bucolic splendor, many chose to live in the
suburbs and take the streetcars to work downtown. Soon, the population density of the
suburbs resembled that of the cities.